


recovery

by cursedcat



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Post-Finale, Spoilers, for the finale but like. i think i'm the last person ever to hear this arc, just like. The Gang's reaction to everything that happened, the town's a mess and everyone is crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 00:16:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14272689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cursedcat/pseuds/cursedcat
Summary: Dylan Mathis takes days to recover from his injuries.  The Graysons assigned to work the case take a bit longer than that.  Errol tells the truth.  Augustus watches the horizon.  Gandy contemplates death.





	recovery

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all, i just binged dust today and it KILLED me. i so wish that we got it for season 2 of taz but i'm sure i'll fall in love with amnesty once i hear it, too. in the meantime, i'll fill the void with my own two hands if i have to. 
> 
> i have no idea if this fic is even good but like the characters had a LOT to unpack following their short four hours and i wanted to dig into that a little. i took a lot of liberties w character interpretation and ages and stuff since we were given so little so don't @ me for that.

Michael himself told Errol that Dylan was going to make it, so he supposed that was as good an assurance as any.  Still, Errol found himself at the boy’s hospital as soon as visitors were allowed, just in case.  He didn’t doubt the immortal’s word, per se, but it was in his nature to make sure that people were taken care of.  And someone needed to bring the boy flowers.

He was recovering nicely.  The surgeon had stitched him up and given him a considerable amount of pain medicine, so much that Errol thought Dylan might not have recognized him the first time he came.  He _had_ just awoken from surgery, after all, and Errol was only the second visiting party (his mother and sister, of course, being there as soon as the doctor allowed).

Dylan squinted at Errol for a long time, apparently trying to place a name to the face that hovered just in his quarter’s doorway.  Errol edged a little closer, still keeping his distance so as not to startle the boy.  Then suddenly, Dylan’s face lit up.  “Mr. Ryeson, I didn’t think you’d- please, come in.”

Errol smiled, relieved, and came closer to the bed.  He placed a small vase of lilies on the table near Dylan’s head.  “I’m glad to see you in good health.”

Dylan nodded as best he could from his half-laying position.  “Doctor says I’ll make a full recovery, with enough rest.” He craned his neck, trying to peek past the ragged tear in Errol’s coat.  “And- and how are you doing?  You were shot, right, did- did the doctor take care of that for you?”

Errol was almost surprised, not expecting a man who’d been stabbed through the ribs mere hours ago to be so concerned with other people’s injuries.  “Oh, yes, the doctor stitched me up right after taking care of you.  No painkillers though.”  And he laughed a little to himself, ignoring the jolt it sends up his side.

Dylan nodded again, slowly.  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said softly, leaning his head back on the pillow.  He was quiet for a moment, and then his gaze drifted to the flowers Errol brought.  “Are those for me?”

Errol snorted.  “Wouldn’t’ve put them on your table if they weren’t, kid.  They’re from my garden.  Carrion Street’s garden, really.  It’s a- a community effort.  Why they call it a community garden, I suppose.”  And he laughed again, though this time at himself.  It was a miracle he’d been able to become a politician given the atrocious habit he had of rambling awkwardly whenever anyone gave him the chance to speak.

Dylan looked at the flowers a while longer, then smiled.  “They’re beautiful.  Thank you.”  His brow furrowed, then, and Errol leaned in with concern.  “Do you… Do you know what they’re saying, out there?”

Errol blinked.  “I’m not sure I quite understand the question.”

“About me.” Dylan’s voice wavered.  “About me killing the sheriff.”

Errol’s posture stiffened.  “I wouldn’t worry about that, Dylan.  What you did was _beyond_ understandable.  No one’s gonna blame you for killing Jeremiah’s murderer.”

“But-” And Dylan’s voice caught in his throat.  “But he was the _sheriff_ , Mr. Ryehouse, and I didn’t even give him a trial.  I didn’t think, I just _acted_ , I just- I transformed.  You’re a fur, you know how hard it is to transform at sunrise.  But as soon as I knew he was the one who killed Jeremiah, I just- I couldn’t help myself.” His voice was barely audible, now, and Errol had to lean in to hear.  “I wasn’t being rational, I was- I was savage. A beast.  They have to blame me for that.”

Errol is startled by the intensity of Dylan’s words, but there is no hesitation when he speaks.  “What you did isn’t your fault.  You can’t blame yourself for a crime that wasn’t really a crime at all.  Remember what my, uh, ghostly coworker said?” Errol paused for a moment to see if his half-joke land.  It didn’t.  He sobered, and said quietly, “Dylan, if you didn’t stop him, he was going to kill us all.  You saved my life back there, I- I owe you a tremendous debt.”

Dylan is quiet.  “Mr. Ryehouse.  What are they saying about me?  My mother refuses to say anything, and even Anne is keeping quiet, even when I beg her.  I drove a knife through the heart of our town’s sheriff in a rage.  What do they _think_ of a monster like that?”

Errol’s heart tightened at the sight of Dylan, hardly old enough to be considered an adult and yet saddled with the conviction of a murder he didn’t commit and the burden of another he committed in the defense of those he loved.  Errol had loitered around the town for a while, after the doctor had patched him up but Dylan was still unconscious from his own surgery.  He’d conferred briefly with his coworkers, who’d each promptly vanished to do their own soul-searching. There was nothing left for him to do but loiter, milling around Carrion Street to ease his people’s worries; patrolling the town square to answer the burning questions of those who awoke too late to see Uncle Oni’s explanation.

No one was bold enough to speak ill of Dylan to his face (he _was_ a fur, after all, and he’d played his own role in the sheriff’s demise).  But Errol didn’t become a politician without learning how to discern people’s true intentions.  And the way that they spoke about Dylan in hushed tones, when they thought no one was listening- it was sickening.

Dylan pleaded with Errol to tell him the truth.  Bedridden as he was, he’d probably be able to avoid the brunt of the rumors for at least another few days while he recovered.  His family had clearly taken the route of shielding him from the truth, and if he didn’t tell Dylan, no one would.  The idea was tempting.

But Errol didn’t become a politician to lie to people.  And, as Errol had just said, he did owe Dylan a debt.

“I’m gonna be honest with you, kid.” Errol said.  “It’s not looking too hot out there.”

He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or heart-broken when Dylan didn’t seem surprised at all.

* * *

 

Augustus was rather pleased with himself after his grand entrance.  After all, his comrades might have defeated Connors, but only he saved them from the wrath of the residents that would have immediately followed.  His task complete, Augustus had leisurely floated down to where Errol and Gandy were standing, shell-shocked, outside the police station.

“Rather clever of me, don’t you think?  Escaping with Gandy’s, ah, _eccentric_ eyepiece like that?” The two hadn’t responded, and the ghost pinned it on their exhaustion and potentially life-threatening injuries rather than a lack of interest in him.  The two excused themselves to, you know, get their lacerations patched up, and Augustus waved them off with a cheerful smile.  When they were gone, Augustus didn’t leave the square.  He had someone he wanted to see.

It was a long shot, really.  He was rather embarrassed to admit that he had no idea where his daughter was at any given moment.  When he died, she had been in town, sure, but she was nearly grown by now.  Perhaps she’d decided to pack up and move elsewhere, away from her father’s legacy and (literal) ghost.  Or, perhaps, she was still in the care of The Church’s nearby chapel, and she was one of the many who’d heard the commotion and come to the town square…

Augustus shot a glance in the church’s direction, then quickly looked back towards the crowd proper.  No, no, of course not.  The church was much farther than the immediate residences and it would take time for news to travel there.  Anna was likely still asleep!  It was seven o’ clock, and teenagers tended to sleep late.  Though, perhaps not under a Father’s watchful eye?  Augustus’s gaze drifted again, and he immediately busied himself with performing an animated introduction to two yet unmet residents.

News would spread to Anna eventually.  It had to.  Even if she had left to live somewhere else, it had to be nearby.  It seemed unlikely she’d want to move so far away from home, or that The Church would let her- her being underage, and all.  What Augustus had done today _must_ have been front-page news, especially for a town as quiet as this.  Some day this week, she’d hear snippets of conversation in whatever place she lived, maybe the city- and she’d hear Drywater mentioned.  And she’d perk up, thinking, _that’s where my dad’s cashew company is_! They would tell her what had happened, and she’d be ecstatic to hear that Augustus Parsons, ghost of her previously corporeal father, was the one who had saved the day.

Or, Augustus thought bitterly, she would hate him for being in town and not visiting.  Hell, he hadn’t even taken the time to find out if she was _available_ to visit.  He hadn’t seen her in, what, five years?  And even though he’d passed over guardianship to The Church, there had to be a part of her that resented him, right?

The most likely option, and the one Augustus loathed the most, was that Anna merely forgot about him.  Not that she literally couldn’t remember him, because who doesn’t remember their father’s unfortunate and suspicious cashew-related death?  But since he wasn’t a presence in her life, it would be easy for him to fade from her recollections.  For him to become merely a shadow. A ghost.

Augustus looked around the crowd again, noting it to be considerably thinner than the last time he’d bothered to check.  His station outside the police building was as much an opportunity to garner attention from passerby as it was a necessity: unlike Errol and Gandy, he really didn’t have a place to go.

The sun was high.  It was noon, or whereabouts; the town bell hadn’t yet rung but Augustus could see people shading their eyes from the late morning heat.  If Anna hadn’t woken by now, she was not long for this world herself.  And _everyone_ in town had come to hear what had happened once they’d woken up.  So she must not have been around.

She would hear about it, eventually.  Augustus knew this.  And when she did…

Augustus drove the thoughts from his mind.  He’d died, and that meant he had to literally leave his life behind.  His work with the Graysons was merely a means to an end, something that would enable him to make up for his sins here, or whatever, and pass onto whatever business ventures awaited him in the afterlife.

A fine thought.  He chewed on it a while, floating there listening to an exhausted Rosa’s nineteenth explanation of the hour. 

“S’pose I should go check up on Gandy and them, make sure they’re all alright,” he muttered.  Rosa, still in earshot, gave him a weary look.

“Who are you _talking_ to, Parsons?”

He had to pull the “sinking into the ground” bit for the second time in a day just to avoid embarrassment.  (It wasn’t quite as hilarious, this time around.)

* * *

 

Gandy sat in her Sanctum Sanctorum, idly flipping through the pages of a book used to contact chaos demons and willing the queasiness in her stomach to go away.  She’d gone to Uncle Oni’s side almost immediately after the confrontation, ignoring even the growing numbness in her arm in favor of showing Uncle Oni exactly what she’d confiscated from Connors’s house.  The enthusiasm was, of course, partly real, but she’d be lying not to admit that part of her urgency in sharing the news was the unexpected presence of Death himself in the square.

Only when Michael was gone did she allow herself to be pulled away by a concerned Errol and the town surgeon, and she submitted easily to treatment.  Squinting at the stiches on her arm, afterwards, Gandy thought it might make a good scar.

She had plenty of those.  One didn’t study magic as thoroughly as she did without a few accidents, and one didn’t travel the globe running multiple “How do you play poker, again?” grifts without getting into a few scrapes.  And, of course, her work with the Graysons hadn’t helped either.  She was no stranger to injuries.  But Death?  Capital-D, eyes-that-stare-into-your-soul, surprisingly handsome but incredibly terrifying _Death_?  That part was new.

She’d told Uncle Oni, eventually.  It had taken until well after eight, but she’d caught him up on who she’d met that morning.  He was her partner in this quest of hers, for better or for worse, and she wanted to ease her nerves about it anyway.

“You met _Death_ , you say?” Uncle Oni said, as obnoxious as ever.  “How astounding!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know Gus put the glasses on your head so you saw all that stuff already.  Cut the act,” she muttered, not particularly annoyed.

“I’m not acting!” Uncle Oni insisted.  “What a wonderful opportunity, to meet Death himself!  To know what awaits you at the end!”  His grating voice took on an infinitesimally more sinister tone.  “To have a chance to glimpse Death’s weaknesses, hmm?”

Gandy swallowed down the lump of bile in her throat that arose from even thinking about Michael’s face.  “My thoughts exactly,” she said instead, to distract from the way her stomach was apparently rising up her windpipe.  “Now that I know who he is, perhaps I can know better how to avoid him.”

“Or destroy him,” Uncle Oni suggested, and Gandy could hear rather than see his smile.

A smile tugged at the corners of her own mouth as she pulled Connors’s book into her lap.  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  We have a lot left to do.”

“But of course,” the demon said.  “We have all the time in the world.”  A pause, then he added, “Or, well, _I_ do.”

Gandy’s smile became tight.  “I will too, Uncle Oni, once I know how to beat that bastard who took my parents.”

Uncle Oni’s pitch rose.  “You mean _Death_ , dear?  Don’t tell me now that you’ve seen his face you’re too afraid to say his name.”

Gandy forced herself to keep an even tone.  “Don’t tell me you’ve lost faith in me already.”  Then, to prove herself, she added, “This only makes me more determined to find a way around death.  Death, or Michael, or whatever he wants – he doesn’t stand a chance.”

The doll containing Uncle Oni’s form grins, and it’s truly grotesque; though he has a limited command over the doll’s physical body, he very rarely uses it unless he has to (by which he means, Gandy offers him something so that he intervenes).  “Well said, my dear.  Well said, indeed.  Now, why don’t we crack into that chaos god’s book which you so smartly liberated from its previous owner, hmm?”

Gandy is all too happy to oblige, if only to chase away the images in her mind of a man, tall and broad and handsome and not entirely unkind, standing over her body with a scythe in his arms.


End file.
